Project ASTRO: History & Evolution

Since
1994, the Astronomical Society of
the Pacific's (ASP) highly successful national Project ASTRO™
program has been providing opportunities for professional and amateur
astronomers to contribute to science education in their local communities.
With startup funding mainly from the Informal Science Education
Division of the National
Science Foundation, Project ASTRO began as an experiment in
the San Francisco Bay Area.
Since then, the program has expanded to include a number of regional
sites across the country, thus forming a "National
Network" that exchanges information regularly. The Project
ASTRO National Staff & Office are
located at the ASP in San Francisco.

The
stability and strength of Project ASTRO is attributable to some
of the following key features:

Keys to Success

Sustainability:
Each site is managed by a lead institution (e.g., planetarium,
university, research center, etc.), and supported by a local consortium
of educational and scientific institutions.

Training:
Astronomers and educators are trained together at 2-day workshops,
with an emphasis on treating both as equal partners.

Multiple
Visits:
Each volunteer astronomer "adopts" a class or youth
group and makes at least four visits during the year.

Inquiry-Based:
The focus is on hands-on, age-appropriate activities that put
students in the position of acting like scientists by asking questions
and finding their own answers.

Research
and Networking:
Project ASTRO uses and makes available to its partners materials
and approaches that earlier educational projects and research
have shown to be most effective. Local networks also allow participants
to learn from one another.

Community
Involvement and Outreach:
In addition to classroom lessons, many partners put on "star
parties" or arrange visits to local astronomy facilities
for their students' families. Special efforts are also made to
reach out to populations traditionally under-served by the scientific
community (for example, we have partnerships working on a Native
American reservation in New Mexico, with mainly African-American
groups in Chicago, and at a school for the blind and deaf in Tucson).
The program also benefits by attracting many minority and women
astronomers as role models.

Please
note that Project ASTRO is not a curriculum in astronomy. There
are no prescribed activities or topics to cover (though a number
of resources are provided — see below). Each partnership draws
upon its own strengths and interests to plan what happens during
each astronomer visit. The strategy works, and independent evaluation
has confirmed that both educators and students involved in the project
have more positive attitudes about science and accomplish more science
learning in the classroom.

Resources

Through
Project ASTRO, the Society created two rich and popular resource
guides for both educators and astronomers called "The
Universe At Your Fingertips" and "More
Universe At Your Fingertips." Both publications are now
disseminated internationally through the ASP catalog, and we recently
took the "greatest hits" from each and had them translated
into Spanish. The result is "El
Universo a sus pies," a collection of 55 exemplary hands-on
astronomy activities for Spanish and bilingual educators, which
started world-wide distribution this winter.

Associated
Programs

Family
ASTRO

With
funding from the National Science Foundation, the Society started
Family ASTRO in 2000 as a new phase
of Project ASTRO. The original "classic" Project ASTRO
educator-astronomer partners found tremendous interest in what they
were doing among the families of their students, and thus Family
ASTRO was born to continue at home what was begun in the classroom.
For more information, click here to
go to the Family ASTRO page.